What the Passover said to the Israelites, the gospel continues to say to us: there is hope and comfort for us, sinful as we are, not because of anything that we can do or have done, but because God is gracious and kind in His covenant. All that the law requires, the gospel gives in Jesus. And how do we receive this gospel comfort? It is by faith alone. Just as Israel had to act on faith in putting the blood of the lamb on their doorposts, we too as the people of God must embrace the promises of God by faith.
By faith he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood, so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them. (Heb. 11:28)
“When I see the blood, I will pass over you.” These words from Exodus 12:13 are some of the most comforting words in the Old Testament, if not in the entire Bible. But comfort (biblically speaking) often comes in the midst of crisis. When God spoke these words to Israel through Moses, Israel was in anything but a comfortable position. For several hundred years, they had been harshly enslaved by the Egyptians. Their God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—had been deafeningly silent throughout those centuries. Egypt was a land full of pagan deities, and Pharaoh was a self-proclaimed deity among them—and he knew neither Joseph nor the God of Joseph. Time has a way of chilling warm memories, and all that God had done for Israel, as well as for the Egyptians, had faded from memory. The people of God now pined away as slaves, laboring under the blighting sun of Pharaoh’s vainglory—a time of crisis was coming to a head.
The darkness broke, of course, as God once again entered the stage of redemptive history to speak and act out His covenant promises. From scene to scene, He squashed Pharaoh’s gods one at a time, like a king defeating the perimeter defenses of a defiant city before attacking the city itself. Inside the fortress of Pharaoh’s overinflated ego, the Egyptian king continued to harden his heart against God and the people of Israel. God further hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and with each unfolding scene, the tension mounted even higher as God made it very clear that Pharaoh’s army was but a fleeting vapor before the King of kings and Lord of lords. All that Pharaoh trusted in (the gods of Egypt) came toppling down one after another until Pharaoh himself was exposed to the encroaching judgment of God. Thus, the final plague was not merely one that struck the heart of Pharaoh’s military; it was one that pierced the epicenter of Pharaoh’s idolatry—his own heart. The final plague would deprive Pharaoh of his son.
We should not rush past this too quickly. In the Egyptian religion, the pharaohs were thought of as gods. Though Egypt had many other deities, the pharaohs numbered themselves among them, and they saw one of the deities’ chief duties as protecting the pharaohs and their families. A son was not simply a child in the arms of his father the pharaoh but was also a future king—one who would ascend to the throne and enjoy the status of a god-king in the land of Egypt. Thus, for God to strike down the firstborn among the Egyptians (and the firstborn son of Pharaoh) was to deal a climactic blow not only to Pharaoh but to the entire worldview of Egypt. As the judgment of God swept through the land of Egypt, the darkness of death overtook every firstborn that was not covered by the blood of a lamb; the Destroyer destroyed them. With this, Pharaoh was defeated and broken. But what of the Israelites?
